It’s spring. Last year. We plant twenty cottonwood saplings, and place eight in a pretty row just outside the northern stretch of the horse pasture fence. After digging twenty canyon-sized holes (because our soil is bad), the rental tractor breaks, and we resort to wheelbarrows and shovels. It takes five exhausting days (after work) to tuck twenty saplings in by hand with a mixture of red New Mexico earth, a truckload of rich black soil from the nursery, aged horse manure, and the special fertilizer mix my gardener husband uses to make those native cottonwoods grow like weeds. Not to mention countless gallons of water.

After the last tree is in the ground, we stroll around the ranch, covered from head to toe with dirt, glasses of red wine in hand, and admire our work. We talk about how much we are going to enjoy these trees with leaves vs. the pinon and juniper that cover our land. We revel in how well the others we've planted in previous years have done. We look forward to the shade they’ll provide for our family and our horses. At the rate we’re going, we’ll turn our high-desert place into a veritable oasis, we say.

Saturday morning we go down to feed the horses, chickens, and geese. But our continued tree admiring is truncated when we see that the top of the cottonwood we planted just outside of the big gate—the very best one we chose specifically for that prominent place—is simply … gasp … gone. Further examination of what’s left of the slender trunk reveals that the top of the tree has been devoured, to be exact.

You have to understand that trees with leaves are in short supply in my part of the world. I want to sit down and cry. My cool-headed husband the engineer says we need to make a plan.

So we discuss the list of suspects instead. Our senior citizen pony is immediately crossed off. The POA’s spotted ears barely reach the fenceline. Dennis’ arabian mare at just 15 hands is granted a reprieve. Possibly, I suspect in a not-very-nice moment, there is some favoritism going on. We conclude that my Andalusian just doesn’t have that type of reach and she hasn’t challenged the fence before. Which leaves—

The Percheron. We’ve only had the draft horse a few weeks. Two-year-old Tobias is snoozing in the corner of the pasture, hind leg cocked, blissfully unaware of his just-found-guilty status. His unbelievably long legs like sturdy tree trunks and his not-too-short, albeit jarhead-like, neck are damning evidence, along with the fact that the big black horse kind of towers over the fence. I’d been warned that draft horses can be hard on fences, and we hadn't planned ahead.

“I didn’t know you were going to buy a damn giraffe,” Dennis says, as if he can read my mind, staring at the pitiful remains of the tree sticking out of the ground. I tell him it will grow back while he glowers at Toby. After all, New Mexico cottonwoods are kind of like weeds. He grunts at me, unconvinced.

We install an electric fence. And we wait for all of the horses to touch it. And there is, I admit, some satisfaction in seeing each horse’s surprise and knowing there will be no more eating of trees as long as that yellow wire delivers it’s bite. We have a little victory song and dance over on our side of the fence among the now safe cottonwood trees, although in the midst of the "hah-hah-gotcha" fun, I do feel sorry for goofy 2-year-old Toby, for whom the new electric fence is a huge shock.

The cottonwood by the gate grows back. We plant more trees.

Flickr photo credit: highdesertshaman